The author is a contributing editor at ft and wrote Chartbook Newsletter
Europe is in a huge spending on national defense. Over the past decade, the EU's military budget has doubled. The reason seems obvious. Europe's defense capabilities are worn out. The Russian threat is real.
But stop and consider the facts.
The decade before the Russian invasion was not a "lost decade" for European soldiers. According to SIPRI data, European NATO members' cumulative expenditure during this period reached 3.15tn above 2023. Much bigger than Russia. Today, it is widely believed that Europe needs more deployable combat power. But Europe already has 147,000 men and women in uniforms - more active troops than the United States.
The scandal is not that the European defense budget has not doubled. The scandal is that Europe spends a lot of money and has little to do with it - there is no effective deterrence, few deployable troops, and no inventory of weapons provided to Ukraine.
Imagine if Europe spent 3.15tn on the energy transition at that time. Four Biden-style IRA plans back to back. But imagine for all the expenses we receive a picturesque landscape with all kinds of solar panels and windmills, but hardly any clean energy available, nor coal paving. This will be a scandal. Then imagine that when faced with a new energy crisis, our first idea was to double this aimless business spending.
If this is common sense, what is madness?
An optimist might say things are not as bad as claimed. In fact, Europe does get at least some (mainly British, French and Turkish) 3tn bucks. With overdue restructuring, even Germany may be installing reliable deterrent forces. A consensus on basic knowledge such as a normal air defense system or a limited choice of tank selection will make everything unique. The bar is very low. All Europe has to do is to achieve the average level of inefficiency in the U.S. military industrial complex with powerful power.
Instead, a cynical person would say that the deprivation of European Baroque militarism is naive. Only very naive people think that military spending is mainly about national security rather than profit. Waste is not a bug - it's a feature. How else do you explain the cost-plus system used to pay for handmade €17 million? How else do you explain the fact that the vast majority of military procurement in larger European countries still exists within national borders? No one is interested in getting available weapons at a sufficient quantity and a good price.
Optimists and cynics have a point of view, but neither passes through common sense now. Common sense requires us to believe that the crisis in Europe’s defense is real and urgent. After spending over $3TN over a decade, Europe has virtually little military capability. The only option to solve this situation is that it is not bad.
But if this extra expenditure is not the secret to despair of despair, it must be related to the theory of change. Obviously, Europe can obtain economies of scale through large orders. But it doesn't require more money, it's just more collaboration between boundaries. To justify this growth, you must believe that the new funding will turn 20th-century militarism into 21st-century combat troops. You must believe that a quantitative surge in spending will somehow bring about qualitative improvements.
In these terms, the regathering in Europe is indeed somewhat similar to the challenge of energy transition. The once-emerging Justice Energy Transition Partnership, which once formed in 2021, is based on the idea that injecting extra money from Europe and the United States will enable large emerging markets such as South Africa and Indonesia to achieve radical transformation by buying ingrained interest groups and removing political barriers to decarbonization.
"Quality" is a lovely idea. But these partnerships are considered ambitious billions of euros. Europe's defense plan is a hundred times larger and will put a lot of pressure on the already stretched budget. At least, European democracies owe their citizens, which is the transparency of the bet they are starting to bet.
This is not common sense. It has been demoted to a healthy military machine for a long time. It's a million bet, more money can somehow fix a broken system.